My friend Lisa was upset about the flippant way the youth of today use the word ‘ghetto.’ In fact, comments like, “She’s so ghetto,” changes the depth of the word for people who lived and suffered under horrendous conditions. Lisa asked the people that follow her blog what they thought about this new usage of the word ‘ghetto.’ With some changes, this was my comment.
Wanting to validate my thoughts, I looked up the word ghetto. Webster dictionary defines ghetto as “1 a quarter of a city in which Jews were formerly required to live. 2 a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.”
An image of the word ‘ghetto’ conjures an Americanized picture in my mind. In western America, one would think of ghettos after visiting some of the reservations where incarcerated Native Americans lived. If you go to Chicago and see the Projects, you would think of ghetto. In all parts of the States, there are areas for indigent people and other areas for the very poor. It is not by choice they live this way but because of ‘social, legal, or economic pressure.’
As a young child, I remember hearing the elders speak of the people in ‘the bottoms,’ a part of my hometown that was occupied by those less fortunate than those who lived in the better part of the city. Lest not forget the phase, ‘they came from the other side of the tracks.’ My community held those people of color, who found their way out of their situation to live the good life, in high esteem. While other people continued to settle in the ghetto for lack of hope.
The expression ‘you can take a person out of the country but you can’t take the country out of a person’ applies here. The environment a person grows up in forms a certain way of thinking and reacting, and becomes a part of that person. No matter how much pretense a person displays in public, it is in private the baggage of the past can appear. In other words, no matter how much the person tries to leave old ways behind, the successful people still feels where they came from. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule.
Regardless of what Webster says, or the labels ghetto implies about people, the word ghetto is nothing but a product of it’s time. A book by Joyce Sequichie Hifler called A Cherokee Feast of Days wrote, “Whatever becomes second nature to us has first caught on in our thinking, only to operate, in time, without thinking at all.
No, I don't care for the flippant used of ghetto. It has negative images attached. As Joyce wrote, “We have to fight habit with habit, deliberately changing one thought, one action, for another. If we simply try to remove the habit without filling the vacuum, we are opening the door for more and worse to come in.” I wonder how ‘ghetto’ will be used in the future.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Leaving a Voice
Blog Archive
About Me
- Ayna's Collections
- New to the writing world, I live with my husband of twenty years in Chicago, Illinois. I have been retired from the work force for fifteen years doing small jobs to earn money and keep constructively busy. I love to garden and have been painting and drawing all of my life. Although challenged with the English language, I found comfort when writing came into my life in the form of rhyming verses. Poetry was an outlet for emotions I needed to express, and because I am dyslexic, this form was easy for me. Later, after 17 years of research, I wrote and published my first book called People of Difference, which is a paternal genealogy study. It was after writing People of Difference that I decide to try my hand at actually writing a short fictional novel. In 1983, I wrote and published Moments of Feelings – a fictional story about a young girl starting life on her own. I received so much pleasure from writing Moments of Feelings that I decided to learn the trade of writing. Although I haven’t written a lot of poetry since I’ve started my ‘late in life endeavor,’ I am hoping the world will keep me on my toes in developing the skills of writing.